pony express

I got a lovely email from a 10 year old reader of Magic Hoofbeats, who is also a horse-drawer like me. I sent her an email with an attachment of this horse drawing.



Her father wrote back saying she'd like to send me one in exchange, but only the actual drawing, so could they have my address? Awesome girl! Not long after I got this in the mail.



(In case you didn't recognize it, this is a great homage to the cover of the book.)



Of course I sent her a drawing on paper back.



Not much is as exciting as actual mail these days, it's become so rare. Thank you Rachel and family! 



please do!



Like the world depended on it!

(More experimenting with watercolour on brown paper, this time filtered with Snapseed on the iPhone.)

happy new year!


May 2013 bring you enough comfort to ease your mind, and enough chaos to feed your soul. May your great expectations all come true, and may you be ambushed by greatness you never expected. May the darkness of the next months bring you enough peace, rest and gentleness to prepare you for brilliant inspiration. May the quiet of winter let you hear the subtle beat of your heart's true desire, may you find whatever means necessary to follow it with all your heart, and may whatever direction it takes you be towards love.

Here's to another great year, my friends! 

snow meets sea



Last night it snowed big feathery beautiful snow on the Connecticut shoreline. It doesn't happen that often. And even more rare, it stuck around and didn't turn into slush with coastal rain. I ran down to the beach at sunset. 









Shebi Arus



Khadija hosted a 3 day retreat at my home-away-from-home, the Dervish Retreat Center of Ithaca, NY.    The weekend was full of whirling classes, meditation, good eating, and woods walking, leading up to an informal sema ceremony on December 17, the annual worldwide celebration of the passing of the poet Rumi. I could only capture a few photos on my beat up phone. Thank goodness there is Instagram to pretty up terrible pictures!

Top photo: Karen in the foreground. She is healthier than ever, and turning so beautifully! 


Sheikha Khadija correcting posture during the sema rehearsal. 



The 10 women whirling students pooling available white clothing to share.



Many breaks to walk in the woods with the staff and the resident puppy.



Putting the beds to bed.



The angelic kitchen staff, Vicky and David.



And the heavenly meals they make.



The sema beginning.



The turn.




The resident peacocks.



And the resident sunrise.


searching


I'm wandering on with this watercolour on brown paper exploration. This one, photoshopped the black in part way, and left it in the speckly phase cause it felt pretty cool.

heart food




In the practice of attempting to perform every task with love, pancakes are fairly easy. 





And most appreciated.




watercolour!


I started out as a young artist in love with watercolour in the art of illustrators like Trina Schart Hyman. But at RISD I was a disaster in watercolour class, which was meticulous, planned, layered still life exercises. I found out there I'm not a planner. Frustrated one night with a watercolour assignment gone very badly, I squeezed acrylic on top of the failed piece then hacked and sanded into it with terrific aggression. It turned out beautifully. So I discovered acrylic to be my true love media, the one that could stand up to my indecisiveness and temper.  

I didn't touch watercolour again until last fall when I made a wedding card for my friends. Maybe I've gotten a to be a more subtle and contemplative painter with age, or maybe I just finally got over whatever happened in that class, but I enjoyed doing it very much.



Finding the tiny travel watercolour palette far easier to use on the road, I painted this map of the Ithaca Zen Center in my sketchbook when I was there this summer. 




Liking the effect of brown paper as a background and white acrylic as a highlight, I tried again with the mockingbird paper puppet for the facebook puppet show.





And then yesterday, the tiny tarot card Fool (at top). I realized I numbered it wrong, I've got to fix that!

I'm doing another mail exchange. Send a letter or some small object to me by November 18, and I'll mail you back a tiny print of The Fool:

Linda Wingerter
Ithaca Zen Center
56 Lieb Road
Spencer, NY 14883

I realize too another hurricane patch is probably in order. Stay tuned. 





stage hand

The incredible Andrew Dawson now has video up of his performance of my hand injury, from his show The Articulate Hand. This was the performance that came to the NYC World Science Fair where I was invited by the moderator to give the audience the finger as an honored guest during the talk back. That was interesting!

It's still hard for me to watch this. Not just because of my ridiculous voice, but also the breaking of the pencil makes me ill. The feeling of my broken finger is still sharp in my memory all these years later.

facebook theater








The new facebook format's cover photo area is a stage begging to be filled. I'm putting on a puppet show of sorts there, at first using myself and Boat #9. Now other characters are starting to enter. The scene changes about every day, making a very slow-motion stop-motion animation. I sped up the 17 days so far in the video.


















It's some tricky business matching the profile picture inset up with the bigger picture. There's a lot to figure out with lighting, the photography, posing, and photoshopping. The first 16 were done in about a 4 x 6 floor space, the camera on a tripod rigged to a ladder with duct tape. I just took a new bunch in a bigger location with some different lighting, hopefully it gets easier, cause I have a million ideas to try. Friend me on facebook if you want to watch, just message me that you're an Antinomia reader.




mockingbird


Playing with watercolor and white acrylic on brown paper for an articulated paper mockingbird.

home port



My zen center friends visited last week and brought all kinds of wonderful things from Ithaca, including a stop over from Boat #5 which has been moored on the banks of the pond for over a month. The weather has made it infinitely more beautiful then before, with a fine pond-goo coating making a grey patina over everything, uniting all its parts into one antique vessel. All my boats from now on will have to be aged this way.

I did some repairs on the matchstick outriggers and sail, and added a bird. Then I cut some tiny fall leaves out of real leaves, cargo to take back northwest.




It gives me a grand amount of happiness that this little boat is contributing to the carving out of a well-worn path between New Haven and Ithaca.



boat #9


A fifth boat manifested suddenly, just in time for the City Wide Open Studios main exhibition last week at Artspace, where it'll be on display until the end of the month. This will be my eighth CWOS show since my first in 2002! It's in another great space, the recently abandoned New Haven Register building on the Long Wharf.

Boat #9 is larger then the Ithaca fleet, and has the addition of bunting and a small person on board.









come on, rainbow!


There's been a remarkable abundance of them this year. Is it just that I'm getting better at catching them? This one was a rare early morning rainbow that knocked me over when I got out of the car at the beach.

Last week I was working in my studio during tornado warnings. Then I felt it: not tornados, but rainbow weather! I hung out my east facing window and stared hard at the grey sky, until out of the mist a bit of color began to appear. It was the first time I've ever watched a rainbow manifest out of nothing. And it turned into a great big double rainbow all across the sky!


Dozens of my friends in New Haven posted the same picture, and then it was posted by the Big E in Massachusetts. Double rainbow all across New England!



sailing to Ithaca


During my August in Ithaca I went to Cayuga Lake with two lovely friends. It was the first time I'd sat doing nothing for a long time. Boats were passing by. There was a breeze of such perfect temperature it felt like it was blowing through my molecules. Something about that day and the friends I was with put a restless feeling in my hands to construct some driftwood boats which I couldn't shake till I got home to Connecticut and tried it. I found plenty of floaty bits on the beach. After some experimentation with ballast and wax, I put four little ships together. 


Seagull feathers make nice sails. 



Also good sails: pages from an antique hymnal. 



Catamaran configurations provide sturdiness for tall, multi-sailed vessels.



The fleet setting sail for Ithaca. My closet doorknob is the moon.



 Just as fun was the challenge of packing them for travel with the US Postal Service to the muses who inspired them. Tied down to a base...



with declaration of presentation...



and instructions. 


 
Another dear friend took this picture of their arrival. They made it! 

This was such a satisfying building experience. How to make myself remember to allow for more do-nothing-times so these ideas have a chance to get in? 



cost of living



I've had so many non-illustration commissions over the last two years --parade floats, puppet shows, mermaids, etc-- that the Winsor & Newton acrylic palette I've maintained steadily since 1996 went unused and dried up. With some new illustration work coming in, I had to start from scratch and purchase my entire palette all at once for the first time in 16 years. Ouch paint is expensive! Here's a comparison of my two purchases that day:

$200 of acrylic paint.


$100 of food.


Thankfully the paint will last longer then the food, and with luck I'll find enough illustration work to turn that paint into many more counter tops like this. And it does feel very good to have my tackle box full of shiny plump tubes again. I've missed painting. 


practical aesthetics

With my new food-centric life, I'm now in the grocery store and farmers' market 2-3 times a week. That's about 2-3 times more often then I was previously. This seems a reasonable amount when eating fresh. When I lived in Rome I noticed people would stop at the Campo de Fiori every day after work. Italians have tiny dorm size refrigerators they barely keep anything in because they mostly eat what they bought that day. This is common sense to them, so foreign to us.

Luckily I learned to enjoy the shopping. Partly it's that I like making a pleasing still life by filling my cart with produce. It's less fun shopping for unattractive, color-clashing packaging. The more beautiful my cart looks, the more healthy it is, really. And adding farmers' markets this summer has brought adventure and suspense to food gathering.

While I was getting the food part down, I was accumulating a mountain of plastic shopping bags I felt pretty bad about, as no trick could make me remember my reusable Stop & Shop bags. I read a blog that suggested buying beautiful shopping bags would make you remember them. I found these big sturdy ones, made of that flat plastic stuff used in bundle packaging. And indeed, I love them so much, I've never forgotten them. Aesthetics have practical applications.

good night, dreamers

I have a new blog. I can't even count what number this is, as I've left blogs littered all over the internet. This one is not of my own work, but collected videos I've been posting regularly on facebook in the evenings. They're all mellow, dreamy, hopeful, and beautiful. The kinds of things you'd want to fall asleep to. You can find it here.

food / love


I have an aversion to lifestyle blogs with pretty pictures of magazine kitchens and perfect meals, so I feel a twinge of ugh posting this picture. However, potatoes and a dirty stove aren't so pretty, and after all there is a heart potato here, found in a bag of goldens this morning. And I do love hearts.

Plus it brings me around to the primary subject of my life in the last year: (surprisingly) food. Before now I've never cared about food. It didn't make sense to me to put time and money into something that would disappear in a short time. I'd rather build or paint something. I ate whatever was quickest. I hated cooking. Foodies and nutritionists seemed to me people who had too much time on their hands.

I had this attitude till age 38 when I became severely gluten intolerant. I'd like to apologize at the start to those who find this gluten free thing absurd. I felt the same way. No need to get into details, I just know because of wheat contamination I can't eat most processed foods without getting violent pain.

I dealt with this at first by eating a diet of 90% gluten free brown rice pasta. Obviously I was pretty unhealthy. Then I went to Kripalu for a week and was introduced to some of the finest whole food cooking probably anywhere. I couldn't believe what could be done with such simple ingredients to make them taste so good. I was for the first time in my life truly seduced by food. The year of deprivation had turned me food-obsessed.

Since then I've been learning how to feed myself with mostly whole and raw foods. It's been a formidable challenge, made more complex by nutritional needs for 8-10 hours a week of strength and cardio training. Learning basic cooking, how to schedule shopping for perishables, calorie counting, protein and portion awareness, it's been a full time education. I've spent the majority of my free time this winter in my kitchen, reading cooking tutorials, and scouring the pretty lifestyle blogs for recipes. And after months of laborious practice, utter confusion, and vaudevillian comedy, I can finally quickly pull together a meal like a normal person. It only took me 40 years. But oh how I love, truly love, this beautiful food, as if I've never seen it before in my life. And I never felt so good.

Here are some not too pretty pictures of imperfect meals. Plate arrangement and color seems to be a motivating factor for me to spend time cooking too.











I take a picture with my phone of everything I eat to monitor myself and remind me what to buy at the grocery store. It works pretty good.